Home Office Organization–21st Century Style

Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

Tami Dubose discusses getting things done using a physics concept:

Did you take physics in school? If so, do you remember this law, even vaguely? If not, no worries, I’m about to explain.

In classical physics the first set of concepts we study are about the laws of motion. These concepts are governed by Sir Isaac Newton’s 3 laws of motion.

Newton’s first law is an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless it is acted upon by an external force. Conversely, an object at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an external force. This law is also known as Galileo’s law of inertia.

In a home-based business, inertia can be hard to overcome since your time is very flexible. But there are several things you can do to make sure you’re getting a respectable amount of important work done each day, work that adds to your bottom line or accomplishes personal things that are really important to you, like taking your kids to the park as soon as they get home from school.

• Plan your important work at the time of day you are most productive. For some people, that’s in the morning. For others, like me, it’s in the late afternoon all the way to about 5 a.m. the next morning. When you can, don’t fight your own body clock and feel guilty about not being up at the crack of dawn to tackle your day.
• Do the most important tasks first. Take your coffee in your office. Don’t get bogged down in your email, read the newspaper or hang out on facebook. If you need to write an important email to send to your list about your business, that isn’t getting bogged down. Responding to client and vendor email is also important. Make important phone calls. Schedule business appointments and attend meetings during this time. If it impacts your bottom line in any way, it needs to be done first.
• I do condone exercise at some point during the day and I believe it’s just as important as any task you do, but you must remain disciplined about it. Much of my exercise is mowing the yard and tending the bushes. It’s a great way to save money and sweat at the same time.
• After your most important task or tasks are done, or you’ve been at it for quite awhile and need a break, take a break. Get up, go somewhere else in the house and do something that needs doing like taking wet laundry out of the washer and putting it into the dryer. Fold a load of clothes while you listen to a training audio, watch a training video, or watch a podcast of a program that is important to you. Start dinner or clean something. By making time for household tasks in your work day you are taking advantage of the best of both worlds. Set a time to stop so you can get back to work.
• Get back on your important tasks. If they’re finished, get through the bulk of your email, postal mail, and organize your desk if it needs it. Run errands or maybe plan your next day, week or month. Some people work best from a set schedule, some work better by task priority and everything else is flexible. Do what works best for you.
• I do my best writing late at night. Whether I’m working on a report, an ebook or a blog post, I do my best writing after 10 p.m. The second best time for me to write is after 3 p.m. Once I start writing I will keep writing until I’m finished, exhausted, starving or my son is insisting upon being fed. I used to have trouble getting started, but now I have trouble stopping. Once you get used to staying in motion, you need an external force to act upon you to get you to stop.
• Have a set time for your work hours. Whether they’re from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. or 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. or 7:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. or a 2 hour day, make sure you have hours during your day that you are working and hours when you are off. Also be sure to schedule your days off. Most people take the weekends off, but in my current businesses, I take Fridays and Saturdays off. If I have the time, I take an extra day off, or work less on some work days.

If you work for yourself, take advantage of your time flexibility and do all the things other people wish they could do, like spend an hour taking a quiet walk with your significant other or going for a family walk or bike ride. Cook healthy meals at home instead of eating out. Do your grocery shopping at 7 a.m. when the shelves are full, the isles are empty and the checkout lines are short.

But whatever you do, make sure you get busy and get your important work done so your business becomes and stays successful. Overcome that beginning-of-the-day inertia. Once you’re moving and accomplishing, you’ll keep it up.

If you aren’t doing because you don’t like what you do, do something else worth getting out of bed to do.

Technorati Tags: home office organization, Newton's first law of motion, overcoming inertia to be productive, physics applied to business, Productivity, Tami Dubose

A new article was published today on Computerworld in the Knowledge Base area of the website. Check it out.

Title: Study: Facebook use cuts productivity at work

Survey finds 77% of Facebookers use the social networking site while on the job

By: Sharon Gaudin

Summary:

The productivity loss overall in a company where employees use Facebook on the job for no business reason is 1.5%. This may not seem like much, but if your margin is 2%, this could mean the difference between closing and staying in business.

A previous study showed students who use Facebook at college get lower grades than students who don’t use it.

Why is this important to home businesses?

If you are cruising around on Facebook for non-business purposes during your work hours at home and thinking you are accomplishing anything, you may not be. When it is just you or you and an employee or two, you’ve got to make the most of your work so you can make the most of your profits.

The most important things you can do while working in your home office or at your home-based business are tasks specific to increasing your bottom line. If what you are doing is not directly putting more cash on your bottom line, you must start doing those tasks first and foremost every day.

Checking email, reading articles in your RSS feed reader, cruising social networking sites for pleasure (not doing research), and performing any task that doesn’t either make money or lead to making money must wait until after the important tasks are done.

You may need to scan your email for important work messages. You may need to scan your RSS reader for articles specific to your business. You may need to reply to a comment on Facebook from a business colleague. But those tasks need to be strictly limited to business and a tight leash needs to be on so they don’t sap your time. If you don’t focus on performing work tasks that make money, you might as well go to the park or play with your kids. The quality of your time would be much better spent.

Every day, do what makes money first, then you will be free to peruse email and articles, and socialize on social networking sites with friends.

If you don’t know how much time you’re spending on each task you perform, get out the kitchen timer and set it for one hour. In that one hour spend your time doing only money-making work, whatever that is for your business. You will be surprised to find at first you are distracted frequently and it will take at least a few days to be able to focus for just one hour.

Another thing you can do is keep a diary for a few weeks on every activity you perform in your business, notes on what you accomplish, how you will profit from it, and what time you started and stopped each task. If you are busy all the time but don’t seem to be accomplishing anything that is adding money to your bottom line, this technique will help you analyze where your precious time is going and what you need to change to improve.

If you spend a lot of time on the phone and need to block out time away from those interruptions, either turn off your phone ringer and let your voicemail catch messages, or send calls to an answering service. Then schedule time each day when you will return calls. You may need to tell people you will return their call within 24 hours, or leave a specific message that you are in a meeting from x-y and will return to your office at z. You don’t have to leave your office to have a meeting with yourself, but those calling don’t need to know that.

Get a handle on your business. Don’t just work in it, work on it. A helpful book to read to improve your business and increase your productivity is The E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber:

Don’t have time to read? Here is the book on CD that you can listen to in your car or load to your mp3 player and take with you:

Sherri Joubert
Getting more productive

Technorati Tags: home office organization, home-based business, make home office profitable, Productivity, social networking, time management, time-wasters

Working at home has some unique challenges. It’s easy to get distracted. What steals your time? What keeps your productivity from being as high as you know it should be? We all have time-stealers in our lives that keep us busy but don’t actually accomplish anything worthwhile.

My Problem

For me, it’s email. I sit down with my coffee first thing in the morning just to see what’s there and if there is anything important that will require my immediate attention.

But instead of just reviewing what’s there, I start reading all kinds of stuff that should wait until later. I do things like read blog posts, newsletters, tons of junk mail from sales lists I really should unsubscribe from, and generally waste time. I also feel a strange obligation to read things that don’t have anything to do with my work or even my life just because they show up in my inbox.

Why do I do this to myself?

I’ve thought a lot about it and I’ve come up with the notion that I like it when my email boxes are empty. I feel like I’m in more control of my life. I handle postal mail the same way, but there is so much less of it.

This is a really bad habit, especially when I’ve been offline for an extended period of time, like I have been because of Hurricane Gustav. We lost power for 9 days, and I just got internet access back at home on September 27. I haven’t dealt with email for a full month because internet access was so sparse. When we needed to get on the web we went to one of our hot spots: Community Coffee House or Chick-Fil-A. I need to focus on business and getting my income back up to normal, but I have hundreds of email messages in each of two inboxes and I’m seriously tempted to hide out until they’re all read and filed or deleted.

I was also reminded there are a lot of things to do off the computer and away from the TV. We had power for nearly 3 weeks but no TV and no regular internet access. We stayed busy getting a lot done around the house that really needed our attention. We still have a lot to do. In that period of time I realized we got a lot accomplished. Accomplished. Done.

Then I realized how much I’m not accomplishing online because of my email habits.

What am I going to do about it?

Here is a task list I came up with while we had no internet or TV. I already do some of it in this order anyway. I just have to be much more disciplined about my first email check of the day.

• Start some quick offline task before making coffee in the morning, like laundry
• Make breakfast while the coffee is brewing, and then eat
• Continue the offline task if needed
• Write a blog post, market a blog, or start on a new niche website while finishing my coffee (limited to one hour)
• Work with my son on his homeschooling assignments
• Errands
• Check email and scan for client and work messages, and important personal messages only
• Ignore the rest of the messages
• Plan the online work for the day
• Lunch
• Yard or other outside work or take a walk or bike ride
• Get back to work and stick to the plan for the day
• Take a break and start supper
• Get back on the computer and finish my work for the day
• Go to my second job on days that I have tutoring students
• Supper
• Optional: continue working online

At this point I’ll allow myself to get into my email boxes and peruse them for as long as I want. In that time I’ll be unsubscribing from as much as I can without interfering with my business or true interests.

I started this schedule when I got internet access back. I know it’s doable because when we went to a hot spot, I didn’t spend a ton of time on email. I scanned for important messages, took care of them, and then went to other parts of the web for news, to write a blog post, to watch the first Presidential debate on September 26, and to see what was up in the connected world.

This experience was an epiphany and I realized I must do all my online work in this fashion, not just during emergencies when we have limited internet access.

What do you do that steals your time? Please leave your stories in the comments.

Sherri Joubert
Trying to be more productive

Technorati Tags: home office organization, Productivity, self-discipline, time management